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The study, which will be published in the July edition of the Journal of Consumer Psychology but is already available online, builds on earlier research suggesting that most shoppers experience a kind of ethical dissonance: If we're actually told that a specific product was produced in an unethical way, we won't want to buy it. Yet given the choice, most of us would rather not know the backstory. We won't make the effort to, say, download an app or check out a website that could give us ethical ratings of manufacturers. And the reason we avoid this extra checking-up is at least partly that we're unconsciously afraid of being upset by what we'll discover.
"Anger is one of the emotions people most often feel if they find out a company is doing something unethical," says Rebecca Reczek, a professor of marketing at the Ohio State University Fisher College of Business. "So choosing not to find out is a way to avoid that kind of negative emotion."...
This has long been a challenge for marketers and will remain so in the future.